Nobody knows why it carries that name. The nickname was already in common use when the antiquarian Power recorded it in 1896, and he could offer no explanation for it either. That quiet puzzle is not the only peculiarity here: the cemetery gives its name to the entire parish of Killmoleran, yet the church from which that parish name derives has vanished so completely that, as Power put it, even local tradition has no memory of where it once stood.

The graveyard lies just across the road from the remains of a Franciscan friary, the two sites separated by little more than the width of the public road between them. Power, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, described the cemetery as ancient, and the church associated with it, Killmoleran, as the source of the parish name. For a long time the site was incorrectly identified, having been mapped against the graveyard attached to the modern Franciscan church nearby. It has since been correctly placed at the Relig na Muc site on Mass Road. The church itself left nothing behind, not a foundation course, not a scatter of worked stone, nothing that tradition could even point to and say: there.